Mr. Lecky, as nearly all modern philosophers, denies God as final cause, if not as first cause. The moral law has its reason and motive in him as our final cause, and this is the difference between it and physical law. The pagan Greeks denied both first cause and final cause, for they knew nothing of creation; but being a finely organized race and living in a country of great natural beauty, they confounded the moral with the beautiful, as some moderns confound art with religion. The author so far agrees with them, at least, as to place duty in the beauty and nobility of the act, or in acts proceeding from the beauty and nobility of our nature—what he calls our higher nature. We do not quarrel with Plato when he defines beauty to be the splendor of the divinity, and therefore that all good, noble, and virtuous acts are beautiful, and that whoever performs them has a beautiful soul. But there is a wide difference between the beautiful and the moral, though the Greeks expressed both by the same term; and art, whose mission it is to realize the beautiful, has of itself no moral character; it lends itself as readily to vice as to virtue, and the most artistic ages are very far from being the most moral or religious ages. The mistake is in overlooking the fact that every virtuous or moral act must be done propter finem, and that the law, the reason, the motive of duty depends on the end for which man was made and exists.
But the author and his school have not learned that all things proceed from God by way of creation, and return to him without absorption in him as their last end. Morals are all in the order of this return, and are therefore teleological. Not knowing this, and rejecting this movement of return, they are forced to seek the basis of morals in man's nature in the order of its procession from God, where it is not. The intuition they assert would be something, indeed, if it were the intuition of a principle or law not included in man's nature, but on which his nature depends, and to which it is bound, by the right of God founded in his creative act, to subordinate its acts. But by the intuition of right, which they assert, they do not mean anything really objective and independent of our nature, which the mind really apprehends. On their system they can mean by it only a mental conception, that is, an abstraction. We indeed find men who, as theologians, understand and defend the true and real basis of morals, but who, as philosophers, seeking to defend what they call natural morality, only reproduce substantially the errors of the Gentiles. This is no less true of the intuitive school, than of the selfish, the sentimental, or the utilitarian. Cudworth founds his moral system in the innate idea of right, in which he is followed by Dr. Price; Samuel Clarke gives, as the basis of morals, the idea of the fitness of things; Wollaston finds it in conformity to truth; Butler, in the idea or sense of duty; Jouffroy, in the idea of order; Fourier, in passional harmony—only another name for Jouffroy's order. But these all, since they exclude all intuition of the end or final cause, build on a mental conception, or a psychological abstraction, taken as real. The right, the fitness, the duty, the order they assert are only abstractions, and they see it not.
It is the hardest thing in the world to convince philosophers that the real is real, and the unreal is unreal, and therefore nothing. Abstractions are firmed by the mind, and are nothing out of the concrete from which they are generalized. A system of philosophy, speculative or moral, built on abstractions or abstract conceptions of the true, the right, the just, or duty, has no real foundation, and no more solidity than "the baseless fabric of a vision." Yet we cannot make the philosophers see it, and every day we hear people, whose language they have corrupted, talk of "abstract principles," "abstract right," "abstract justice," "abstract duty," "abstract philosophy," "abstract science;" all of which are "airy nothings," to which not even the poet can give "a local habitation and a name." The philosophers who authorize such expressions are very severe on sensists and utilitarians; yet they really hold that all non-sensible principles and causes, and all ideas not derived from the senses, are abstractions, and that the sciences which treat of them are abstract sciences. Know they not that this is precisely what the sensists themselves do? If the whole non-sensible order is an abstraction, only the sensible is real, or exists a parte rei, and there is no intelligible reality distinct from the sensible world. All heathen philosophy ends in one and the same error, which can be corrected only by understanding that the non-sensible is not an abstraction, but real being, that is God, or the real relation between God and his acts or creatures. But to do this requires our philosophers to cast out from their minds the old leaven of heathenism which they have retained, to recognize the creative act of God, and to find in theology the basis of both science and morals.
Mr. Lecky proves himself, in the work before us, as in his previous work, an unmitigated rationalist, and rationalism is only heathenism revived. He himself proves it. He then can be expected to write the history of European morals only from a heathen point of view, and his judgments of both heathen and Christian morals will be, in spite of himself, only those of a respectable pagan philosopher and in the latter period of pagan empire, and attached to the moral philosophy of the Porch. He is rather tolerant than otherwise of Christianity, in some respects even approves it, lauds it for some doctrines and influences which it pleases him to ascribe to it, and to which it has no claim; but judges it from a stand-point far above that of the fathers, and from a purely pagan point of view, as we may take occasion hereafter to show, principally from his account of the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of the Christian religion in the Roman empire.
But we have taken up so much space in discussing the nature and foundation of morals, to which the author devotes his preliminary chapter, that we have no room for any further discussion at present. What we have said, however, will suffice, we think, to prove that rationalism is as faulty in morals as in religion, to vindicate the church from the charge of teaching a selfish morality, and to prove that the only solid basis of morals is in theology.
Faith.
Faith is no weakly flower,
By sudden blight, or heat, or stormy shower
To perish in an hour.
But rich in hidden worth,
A plant of grace, though striking root in earth,
It boasts a hardy birth:
Still from its native skies
Draws energy which common shocks defies,
And lives where nature dies!
Oratory, Birmington. E. Caswall.